Posted
by
Roblimo
on Thursday April 19, 2012 @10:52AM
from the everybody-loves-Larry dept.

In this exclusive video interview, Slashdot chats with Leisure Suit Larry creator Al Lowe, who is working with Replay Games and Kickstarter to bring Larry Laffer to a whole new generation of computers. They'll maintain the original Larry style of being naughty without crossing the line into porn, which is appropriate for an 80s game about a 70s dork who wears a (shudder) leisure suit. You can donate to this effort through Kickstarter if you like. (We aren't getting paid to say this, and it's a labor of love for Al, too, who is more recently famous for running the hokey daily comedy email newsletter, CyberJoke 3000.)

It seems like all the old designers of all the cool games from my youth are suddenly coming out with Kickstarters and/or new products. For old time Sierra it was Al Lowe, then Jane Jensen of Gariel Knight fame, and just recently the Two Men from Andromeda are back(Space Quest). Brian Fargo of Interplay fame is back with Wasteland 2, and Shadowrun is back with its original creator. Its an exciting development, but my hunch is its short lived.

Liesure Suit Larry was never a big favorite of mine, mostly because I was too young to get any of the jokes. I still donated though just to show support for the old Sierra crew. Next we need to get Toys For Bob to work on Star Control 4.

Not just those either. They are rebuilding the entire Baldurs Gate series through Kickstarter, and a bunch of old school type games are being made, like Legend of Grimrock. Very old school, with new graphics. A sure sign that the original video game generation is getting older. Me, I would love to see the No One Lives Forever series with shiny new graphics, and the same gameplay

I'd love to see the old Lucasarts point&click brought back to life (other than with ScummVM on my phone, which is already great).
I mean, Sam&Max and Monkey Island got a new life thanks to Telltale, but what about Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Zak McKracken ?

My info came from here [shacknews.com]. Admittedly, its looks like they don't mention Kickstarter, but old school games are still being built. Like Legend of Grimrock, but without Kickstarter. My bad. Also the official BG Site [baldursgate.com] has a good bit of news on it. I am looking forward to this one. They are remaking the entire series.

Kickstarter is starting to ruin me, I'm already funding five projects, included this one... and now you tell me the Guys From Andromeda are having one too. Damnit, it will be Ramen at the end of the month again...

I'm all for a proper sequel to Star Control 2. No, Star Control 3 never happened. Though I wonder how the current generation of gamers would handle this type of gameplay. Balance between ships in Star Control did not exist. Some ships were just plain better than others, some ships just sucked, and some ships were more about rock paper scisors versus other ships.

Also, I'd like to thank the old Lesuire Suit Larry for teaching me much of my English. Never underestimate a kid who doesn't speak English, has a di

You weren't very good at SC2 then. I am out of practice now, but back then I could beat almost any ship with any other ship, including taking out a Chmmr Avatar with a Pkunk Fury.

While this is true on average, there has been some relatively interesting results lately. The Star Control 2 port named Urquan Masters added internet multiplayer for melee a while back. The result is their forums are full of some interesting ship rankings on which is best. There have even been some pretty good results of redoing the cost of each ship based on how powerful they actually are. Results are pretty surprising.

Brian Fargo isn't the only one - I noticed inXile and Obsidian are teaming up for Wasteland 2, and Obsidian hired Tim Cain late last year (the first employee working on and lead programmer for Fallout) so I have to wonder if he's involved as well.

Strangely, Al Lowe didn't really create the game that is Leisure Suit Larry, which is also the one being remade, he took a text adventure game (Softporn Adventure by Charles Benton) and made it graphical and created the titular character, who was unnamed in the ori

If you can find the CD ROM boxed set of LSL games, it comes with Softporn Adventure. LSL was definitely inspired by it in terms of style and so on, but I don't recall much similarity in terms of story...

Lately I have been replaying the Quest for Glory games... I am not sure if it is just nostalgia. But I like the old Sierra games, they were not the high action games, even the Quest for Glory games which were the more action pact then the others, still had most of your time walking around and looking and trying to solve puzzles. That didn't require Top notch hand eye coordination. Back in the days Sierra Games were Top of the Line in graphics. Your reward for solving a puzzle was to be able to get to a new screen. In the days before internet these games were hard to go threw if you won it you felt like a hero, as you would play the game for months to try to win and solve the problems. Sometimes you are spending your time solving a problem that doesn't exist. I want to break into the Bakers shop, but I get arrested for making too much noise, I find ways to do it quieter and still I never got in... Well There isn't a way in. You don't know that, perhaps if you get in you can get something good.

That baker shop haunted my dreams. I was *sure* there were treasures galore inside. Got arrested way too many times trying to get in. Even accidentally killed my character with a lock pick trying to get that damn "gone fishing" door to open.

This is not the first time it's come back. Last time was in 2009. Got absolutely horrible reviews. [metacritic.com]That was clearly shovelware with the name slapped on it. This take sounds like someone is actually putting effort into it though.

Is that good? Surly the point is, old game looks old. The UI is awful and sound is dire; but somehow they are still better that today's games EVEN if you don't heap on a ton of nostalgia.
It would be a shame/crime to change some of them. I loved the work by Team 17's artist Rico Holmes when I was playing their stuff year ago. Whilst looking for Rico's surname I found reference to a Leisure Suit Larry remake Team 17 made. Code masters touched it, so no shock it was awful. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure [wikipedia.org]

I read those LSL Kickstarter pages some days ago, and they read exactly like some April Fools joke. It appears they are serious and I wish them luck, but just look at this piece from the FAQ, for example:

Our good friends over at Tell Tale have licensed King's Quest from Activision. If we do our job right then maybe, just MAYBE we'll be able to partner with them and ruinite the Space Quest team, King's Quest team (go Roberta!!!!) and Police Quest team for re-makes or new versions of those (Space Quest 7 anybody?).

I'm wondering how kickstarter is going to be long term. It seems like a lot of crappy games manage to get funding which amazes me. Kickstarter is for most projects a means of preselling the end result of the project and from what I can tell, the money put into it usually dwarfs what you would be paying if you were buying it retail. I have a cool game idea that I've been working with and its feasible, unique, and doable, but I don't have the free time. With kickstarter I could secure money that I would lose by reducing the hours I put into my job (or quitting if enough people donate) and dedicate my time to the project, then turn and make a good profit if it sells. Worst case, I at least get paid if I set my target threshold high enough, and based on what I'm seeing, I'll get paid more than I'm being paid right now.

My only issue is that I hate top skimmers and there are two on these project donations. Kickstarter takes 3% and the credit card companies take another 3%. The economics of it always make it a win since there is no risk in putting your project up, but still, is there a kickstarter like website that takes a smaller cut?

Wow, you're worried about 6% of what is essentially free money? There might be places that take a lower cut, but you won't reach nearly as many people, which is kind of the point.

That said, I do wonder how much Kickstarter will continue to grow. I think it was a brilliant idea and wish I'd come up with it myself. Instead, I'll just have to start a project of my own. Success is all about the incentives, though, which tend to be hard to come up with for software.

Keep in mind that at best, you can only drop the platform's take. If you need to accept credit cards, PayPal, or whatever - they have their own charges. You can try to accept BitCoins, I suppose.

The exact takes per platform are sometimes difficult to decipher, depending on how you set up your project, whether or not it's successful, how people are paying (if a backer uses a throw-away credit card, the take is higher), etc. Plu

As a looser with looser mindset you should try to use your own webpage, then you will get 100% of $0, witch is what you want, after all.

Do not consider ever getting 94% of possible hundreds of thousands if you are good, because you will discover that you are not good enough, or that people do not trust you to deliver because "give me money so I could spend it what I want" only works

the money put into it usually dwarfs what you would be paying if you were buying it retail. I have a cool game idea that I've been working with and its feasible, unique, and doable, but I don't have the free time.

The lowest donation request is typically a decent price (and usually less) for the game. All other levels usually come with a bonus (tshirt, face in game, lunch with designer)
Good luck with a new project. You probably need to do some work before hand to show you are serious, and where you are headed, and to give people a reason to donate to your project.
Sure Kickstarter takes their percent, but they also bring people to you. While you hate "top skimmers" they are offering a service. You won't get much m

Old school adventure games used a text interface. T Mid-school (high school?) adventure games had the click-action-bar/click-object interface which would seems designed for a touch interface. But what about a mix of old and new? A text-interface with voice commands instead of typing. You might not want to play LSL in public, though ("Ask the hooker to fuck me in the asshole with a dildo").

Title: Help Al Lowe Bring Back Leisure Suit Larry!"Description: 80s video game character Larry Laffer is stuck in the Land of the Lounge Lizards and needs your help to return.

00:00) <TITLE>The SlashdotTV logo bar with "Leisure Suit Larry Comes Again!" scrolling from right to left appears over a title graphic in the style of the old Leisure Suit Larry games reading "Leisure Suit Larry in The Land of the Lounge Lizards" while in the background the Leisure Suit Larry theme tune plays.

00:10) <TITLE>A picture-in-picture insert of Al Lowe giving his interview is shown in the bottom right corner over a view of a Leisure Suit Larry game setting."Your Host: Al Lowe" scrolls into the SlashdotTV logo bar.Throughout the interview, the background changes between various Leisure Suit Larry game settings and the picture-in-picture view of Al Lowe disappears, re-appears, zooms in, zooms out, and other shenanigans appear.

00:11) Al>About a year ago Paul Trowe gave me a call and said "I think I can obtain the rights to Leisure Suit Larry. [...]

00:19) <TITLE>A static view of Paul Trowe fades in and out of the picture-in-picture view while the SlashdotTV logo bar reads "Paul Trowe is the primary instigator of ReplayGames.com"

00:19) Al>[...] Would you be interested in helping me do a remake?" and I said "Absolutely!"In the last.. oh, gosh.. it took him probably a year to obtain the rights, and then a period of months to seek funding.When Tim Schafer [...]

00:19) <TITLE>The SlashdotTV logo bar fades in and out of view, reading "Tim Shafer of Double Fine did an amazing KickStarter campaign".

00:19) Al>[...] blazed a trail for the rest of us back in - when was it, February or March - he made it obvious that crowdsourcing was the way to go with this thing.So we jumped on KickStarter, we developed a.. I think a funny video, it's kind of pleasant.. and asked people for money and we've been absolutely astounded with the response we've gotten - a real kick.

01:08) Al>I think we've done a lot of creative - shall I say - reward levels.We've got a bunch of interesting stuff, and in the true spirit of Leisure Suit Larry; a little on the naughty side, but not obscene.We're just havin' a ball with this.

01:40) Al>[...] the campaign doesn't make its goal, nobody gets charged anything; we get nothing, and you pay nothing.

01:48) Al>We're giving people a chance to actually be in the game, to put an image of themselves in the game.In fact, if you remember Leisure Suit Larry, there was always a friendly dog that, if you stopped moving for too long, the dog would show up [...]

02:06) <TITLE>The background changes to a view of the scene described.

02:06) Al>[...] and humiliate you in yet another way; we're even giving you a chance to have your dog immortalized in the new version of the game *laughs*

02:16) <TITLE>The background music changes to that of a live version of the Leisure Suit Larry theme tune, played by Axes Denied.

02:26) Al>We need your support.If you ever played Larry and maybe didn't pay for it back then, now that you've got money, you've got a job, and you can afford it: come and help us - give a donation - give us a little donation on KickStarter.com [...]